Hall of Fame: Ty Cobb (1936)

The “Georgia Peach” wasn’t so peachy.

Before I start, I would like to explain what follows. This is going to be a brief biography of Ty Cobb, mainly focusing on his baseball career. It is not meant to be extensive, innovative, and incredibly exhaustive. It is meant to educate and give a general idea about an important person in baseball history. While I realize most of you know who Ty Cobb is, not everyone does, and not everyone knows a whole lot about him. Furthermore, this is the beginning of a series of such posts about important people in baseball history, and you may not know who all of them are. This post on Ty Cobb begins the series on Hall of Fame players. I’ll begin with the initial class and move forward chronologically until I run out of Hall of Fame players to write about. Future series will include mini-bios on Negro Leaguers (I’m giving them a special series even though some are in the Hall because I may include more than who is in the Hall) and important executives (I plan to mix these up even though the first several will be Hall of Fame players). Again, these are meant to be educational. I’ll do more specific and detailed posts on things such as certain seasons, events, World Series, etc. As for the link, it is brought to you by Baseball-Reference, your home for anything regarding baseball statistics.

Tyrus Raymond Cobb was born on December 18, 1886, and he played from 1905 to 1928. When Cobb went out to try for a semi-pro team, his father told him, “Don’t come home a failure.” In August of 1905, he was sold to the Detroit Tigers, but in the same month, his mother killed his father. Supposedly, his father suspected his mother of infidelity and snuck past his own window to try to catch her, but his mother thought he was an intruder and shot him. Cobb would later attribute his play to the memory of his father saying, “I did it for my father. He never got to see me play … but I knew he was watching me, and I never let him down.”

Cobb’s playing career was obviously remarkable. At age 20, he became the youngest to win a batting championship until Al Kaline did it in 1955 while a day younger. He apparently cherished winning batting titles so much that he sat out to preserve his average and played mind games with Shoeless Joe Jackson. Cobb also set the single-season stolen base record by stealing 96 bases, which stood until Maury Wills broke it. This style of play caused Cobb to resent the up-and-coming Babe Ruth who hit home runs and refused to be the hit-and-run player Cobb was (Cobb also hated Ruth’s lifestyle), and in order to prove himself, Cobb decided to swing for the fences for a series. In one series, he hit 12 of 19 with five home runs and 29 total bases. Ruth responded by saying, “I could have had a lifetime .600 average, but I would have had to hit them singles. The people were paying to see me hit home runs,” a feeling still present today. In 1921, Cobb would become a player/manager, but he was never really liked and was never really successful. Later that season, he became the youngest and fastest (in at-bats) to 3,000 hits, both records are still intact.

He retired after the 1928 season having hit at least .300 for 23 consecutive seasons, an amazing record not likely to be broken. A dead-ball era legend, the “Georgia Peach” is arguably the best player in baseball history. He received the most votes (222 of 226) in the inaugural Hall of Fame class in 1936.

Off the field, Cobb had a violent temper and was an unabashed racist (albeit, he lived in a much different time with much different values). He stabbed a black man for being “uppity” and choked a black woman when she tried to defend her husband. Cobb also fought with an umpire underneath a grandstand after a game, and the fight was only broken up after Cobb knocked the man down and began to choke him. At the end of his life, Cobb, however, seemed to see some of the error of his ways and supposedly told Joe E. Brown, a comedian, that he regretted having no friends at the end of his life. Cobb died on July 17, 1961.

2 Responses to “Hall of Fame: Ty Cobb (1936)”

Cobb was a racist, no doubt about it. But there’s a story I remember hearing about how he helped support a black man who lost both his arms in a dray wagon accident, who was trying to save some kids. That might not be the exact story, but something close to it.

He also provided support to Jimmie Foxx and Pete Alexander, when they fell on hard times and couldn’t support themselves.

He was obviously a very troubled man who had a lot of issues, but wasn’t quite as bad as made out to be.